Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  A word on Power Point presentations.  It has come to my attention that young people, digital world natives, look down on Power Point as a matter of graphic design.  My initial response to queries (or, rather, to ridicule from the young-uns) has been simply that I don't want to buy anything expensive. Power Point comes with the box.  But now I'm told there are other free resources, including one with the amusing name GIMP. GIMP means GNU Image Manipulation Program. Let's not get into what GNU means.  So I appeal to the readers of this humble blog. Is GIMP effective? Is it easy to learn how to use? Do people who have used it come to prefer it to PowerPoint? I await your wisdom.

Returning to the issue of the interface of copyright and design patents, which I discussed here on May 12: In the course of my research for an upcoming book review, I've gone as I sometimes do beyond the 'four corners' of the book and have read the following blog post, from Pamela Samuelson: https://patentlyo.com/patent/2017/05/overlapping-protecting-innovations.html That entry, posted almost precisely a year ago now, contends that in the specific field of application program interface (API) there isn't any significant overlap between the two sorts of IP protection. That position puts Ms Samuelson (portrayed here, a professor at Berkeley Law) at odds with the Federal Circuit, which recently (in ORACLE v. GOOGLE) said precisely the opposite.

Somehow bitcoin imitators have gotten the impression that designing a new crypto currency is easy. It isn't. It was a subtle work of coding and for that matter an unlikely convergence on infrastructural questions that produced bitcoin. Others have successfully piggybacked on that, creating alternatives with a tweak here and there. But bitcoin retains its dominance. And trying to do the whole thing again from scratch? Good luck. Miracles don't cluster, as Daniel Webster used to say. Enter Etherium. This is a crypto currency supported by the largest crowdfunding project in history and software called the Decentralized Autonomous Organization, or DAO.   Early on Friday, June 17th, someone began exploiting a flaw in the DAO and stole 3.6 million of the "Ether" (the units of this currency) -- given the dollar/ether exchange rate just before the attack, this amounts to a loss to the participants of US$80 million. In the words of Tom Simonite, who wrote about this ...

The human mind likes its data visually presented. Thus, the demand for Interactive Data Language, a computer language used to create high-quality graphics. It began life as the product of Research Systems Inc., and that company's founder, David Stern. In 1981 the company released a variant for VAX/VMS, the architecture that Digital Equipment Corporation  was using. Although IDL's earliest use was in astronomy and the space sciences, it soon proved adaptable to such fields as medicine and nuclear physics. According to Liam E. Gumley of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the language is used in "monitoring and controlling the plasma field of a nuclear fusion tokamak." I wrote about this (including the above paragraph verbatim) for eHow back in September 2010.  Some Q-and-A operation called Brothersoft picked up on my explanation a year later: Brothersoft. It was a neat challe...